4/09/2009 @ 8:00AM

Thoughts

Cynics old and young are fond of saying there’s nothing to be said for growing old except the alternative. And quite often it’s suggested that even the alternative is preferable. As usual, cynics see the glass half empty. But getting older has its own rewards. Like grandchildren. As I know from seven of our own, the joy of them is unleavened by the parental necessity of incessant nay-saying, carting, feeding and fussing. No matter what their age you can treat grandchildren as people you love, not people you’re totally responsible for raising. It’s an inestimable advantage to hear and to grant, to sympathize and empathize with them. Of course, you’ve paid your dues. All the mistakes you made with your kids you can avoid with your kids’ kids.

– Malcolm Forbes (1988)

Half the people in America are faking it.

–Robert Mitchum

No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

–Lily Tomlin

Cynicism is cheap–you can buy it at any Monoprix store–it’s built into all poor-quality goods.

–Graham Greene

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

–Sydney Harris

When there are two conflicting versions of a story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

–H. Allen Smith

Fortune’s a right whore.

If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,

That she may take away all at one swoop.

–John Webster

We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.

–Tennesse Williams

Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.

–Ingmar Bergman

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

–H.L. Mencken

A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.

–Edgar Shoaff

No literature can outdo real life when it comes to cynicism. You’re not going to get a person drunk with a jigger when he’s just polished off a barrel.

–Anton Chekhov

In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

–Norman Cousin

Newspapermen, as journalists used to be called, have long been charged with the sin of cynicism, a characterization that many of us encourage to deflect attention from our far more widespread flaw, incorrigible sentimentalism.

–Robert Manning

There ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

–Reinhold Niebuhr

What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too; yes, pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

–John le Carre

Irony differentiates. Cynicism never does.

–Paul Horgan

A Text …

We beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands.